Archive of 2008 EVFF Website:

The Fine Art of Joan Allen

Welcome to the Embarras Valley Film Festival (pronounced “Am-brah”) co-sponsored by Eastern Illinois University’s College of Arts & Humanities and the Coles County Arts Council. The EVFF is a yearly event honoring a person or theme relevant to the Embarras Valley, which encompasses much of East Central Illinois. This year, the EVFF celebrates the fine art of actor and former EIU student Joan Allen.

About Joan Allen

Largely underappreciated for years in Hollywood before her Oscar-nominated turn as the First Lady in Nixon(1995), Joan Allen has had a distinguished career encompassing the stage, screen, and television. A native of Rochelle, Illinois, where she was born August 20, 1956, Allen developed an interest in acting while in high school, where she was voted most likely to succeed her senior year. Allen went on to study theatre at Eastern Illinois University. Although she transferred to Northern Illinois University in 1976 where she graduated, she still remains connected to Eastern through the College of Arts and Humanities and the Theatre Department. After graduating, she moved to Chicago, where she became one of the founding members of the vaunted Steppenwolf Theatre Company, along with such respected talents as Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.

Allen made her screen debut with a small role in the 1985 film Compromising Positions and a year later played two wildly different characters in Manhunter and Peggy Sue Got Married. Her portrayals of a tragically confused young woman who attempts to seduce a serial killer in the former film and a brainy high school student in the latter impressed a number of critics, but it was on the stage that Allen was most appreciated. In 1988, she won a Tony award for her Broadway debut performance in Burn This, and a year later, she earned her second Tony nomination for her role in Wendy Wasserstein's highly acclaimed The Heidi Chronicles.

Following increasingly substantial roles in such films as In Country (1989), Ethan Frome(1992), and Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), Allen won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her stunning portrayal of First Lady Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone's Nixon. The acclaim surrounding her performance in the 1995 film finally gave Allen the Hollywood recognition she deserved. Her performance as Pat Nixon has been called “riveting” and “dead-on.” The following year this recognition was further enhanced with her Oscar-nominated turn as the long-suffering Elizabeth Proctor in Nicholas Hytner's adaptation of The Crucible.

More praise came Allen's way in 1997, when she headlined a stellar ensemble cast in Ang Lee's lauded adaptation of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm. That same year she went in a completely different direction, starring as the wife of an FBI agent (John Travolta) in John Woo's popular action thriller Face/Off. Allen returned to the realm of the repressed housewife in 1998, starring (and reuniting with Maguire) in the acclaimed 1950s-set comedy drama Pleasantville. The turn of the century found Allen taking leads in a trio of issue-oriented dramas: In the multi-character handgun treatise All the Rage (released on video in 2000), she played the wife of a short-fused lawyer (reuniting with Pleasantville's Jeff Daniels in the process); in the Irish production When the Sky Falls, she teamed with The Long Good Friday (1980) director John Mackenzie to tell the true, tragic story of a Dublin crime reporter; and in Rod Lurie's The Contender, Allen nabbed her biggest role to date -- and her first Best Actress Oscar nomination -- as a would-be U.S. vice president who finds herself at the center of a sex scandal.

After all the attention for The Contender, the savvy Allen continued to oscillate between big roles in low-profile independent films and small roles in big-budget popcorn fare, to even greater success. She featured prominently in two of the biggest box-office hits of 2004: the sentimental romance The Notebook and the wildly successful second installment of the Jason Bourne franchise, The Bourne Supremacy. In the latter, she dug into a meaty, sympathetic supporting role as an all-business CIA agent who pursues the framed title character, a role she reprised in the 2007 installment of the series, The Bourne Ultimatum.

Spring 2005 saw the near-concurrent release of two of her indie films, both of which premiered at Sundance Festivals from years prior: Campbell Scott's lapsed-hippie family drama Off the Map and Mike Binder's Terms of Endearment-ish saga The Upside of Anger. Allen is currently working on three films due out in 2008: Good Sharma, Death Race, and Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, films that will continue to highlight Allen’s ability to excel in multiple roles for multiple audiences (See Rebecca Flint, Ephraim Katz, and IMDB).

Joan Allen

Joan Allen Phone Interview

Film critic and EIU alumnus Dan Gire will conduct a live telephone interview with Joan Allen on Friday, November 7, at 7:30 p.m., in the Doudna Fine Arts Center's Lecture Hall. All EVFF events are free and open to the public.

Booth Library Exhibit

EIU Alumna Joan Allen -- Star of Stage, Screen and Television

In conjunction with the 2008 Embarras Valley Film Festival showcasing the career of Joan Allen, EIU’s Booth Library will stage an exhibit honoring the celebrated actress and former Eastern student. Drawn largely from the collection of J. Sain of the Theatre Arts Department, the exhibit will include materials depicting her time as a theatre student at Eastern, her subsequent career with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, her award-winning performances on Broadway, her appearances on television, and her distinguished film career. A Tony Award-winning actress, Joan Allen has received a number of other prestigious awards, and has been nominated three times for an Academy Award. On display in the north lobby of Booth Library from late October through November, the exhibit will include—among other things—photographs, playbills, newspaper and magazine articles, reviews, advertisements and movie posters.